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English Language Was Napoleon’s Second Waterloo

Napoleon was ultimately as defeated by the British on the page as he was on the battlefield, a letter written in March 1816 and sold at auction outside Paris for more than $400,000 on Sunday suggests.

The letter, written while held by the British on St. Helena a year after the Battle of Waterloo and addressed to the Count Las Cases, his informal English tutor, shows Napoleon struggling with spelling and grammar “at his bonk,” or bunk. It is one of three known letters by him in English, according to the Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau, which sold the letter to the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris for nearly five times the estimated price after a bidding war.

The text of the letter, which begins “It’s two o-clock after midnight, have enow sleep, I go then finish the night into cause with you,” suggests that Napoleon took nearly two hours to fill a 13-line sheet. (“Cause” is most likely a mistranslation of the French verb “causer,” or chat.)

According to a transcription in The Independent, the letter goes on to discuss the arrival of a ship bearing news from France – or something like that: “He shall land above seven day a ship from Europe that we shall give account from anything who this shall have been even to day of first january thousand eight hundred sixteen. You shall have for this ocurens a letter from lady Las Case that shall you learn what himself could carry well if she had co[n]ceive the your occurens. But I tire myself and you shall have of the ado at conceive my.”

Jean-Pierre Osenat, the auction house’s director, told The A.P. that the letter showed Napoleon’s deep respect for the enemy he had once denounced as “a nation of shopkeepers.”

“He really had a great admiration for England, the rules and history,” Mr. Osenat said. “The English have the wrong idea: Napoleon didn’t hate them. He was just a military man, and the French interests were different to the English.”